It’s 2013 in China already, where the clock runs 13 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Standard Time. As cheers erupted from Beijing to Shanghai to Chengdu, wishes and reflections for the new year also rained down on Sina Weibo, a Chinese micro-blogging platform that is the equivalent of China’s largest public square. A search on [...]
On December 18 2012, an opinion piece titled “The Internet Is Not Outside the Law” was published on the front page of the People’s Daily, a print media in China considered a mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party. The commentary read in part: “Considering how fast [the Internet] has developed, how simple it is to [...]
What did China search for in 2012? It wasn’t the hotly disputed Diaoyu Islands or the widely-watched London Olympics. On Baidu.com, China’s homegrown search engine commanding about 83 percent of the Chinese search market, the most popular searches focus on stories discovered and spread by Internet denizens themselves. Chinese web users were not only passive [...]
Chinese authorities may be busy cracking down on a “doomsday cult,” but end-of-days chatter is still dominating Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. A recent search early in the morning on December 21, 2012, Beijing time shows that five of the ten “hottest” posts on the micro-blogging platform all relate to the forthcoming end of the world. [...]
This article was produced in collaboration with ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. CNPolitics, a Chinese-language news website, recently released this infographic examining the differences between China and America’s wealthiest individuals as reported by Forbes Magazine. As the site notes, China’s relatively recent economic rise means its wealthy tend to be younger. Perhaps surprisingly for a country where all land legally belongs [...]
[The following is an op-ed and does not necessarily represent the view of the editors.] In the past four decades since the recovery of diplomatic relations between China and Japan, one issue has constantly haunted the two nations’ relationship: The Yasukuni Shrine controversy. When Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited China in 2001, he expressed [...]
It’s been a fascinating year in Chinese cyberspace. Chinese Internet users now number about 538 million, with hundreds of millions of those generating over 100 million posts per day on Sina Weibo, China’s most vibrant micro-blogging platform. No wonder: With once-in-a-generation political upheavals and a steady stream of scandalous, salacious, and sentimental stories, there has been [...]
On Sunday, Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) returned to power, winning 294 of the 480 seats in the lower house of the nation’s parliament, which is empowered to choose the nation’s Prime Minister. Ex-prime minister Shinzo Abe, who held the position in 2006-2007, will thus lead the country once again as its seventh prime [...]
This article also appears on Tea Leaf Nation partner sites ChinaFile and The Atlantic. Tragedy can strike anywhere. Mere hours before the horrific shooting at an American school in Newtown, Connecticut that left 28 people dead, including 20 children, a horrific school attack also happened in China. At an elementary school in a village in Guangshan [...]
In mid November of this year, the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of Aokang Group Ltd, China’s largest privately-owned shoe manufacturer, in its lawsuit against what it labeled unfair anti-dumping tariffs. The ruling stipulates that Aokang will no longer be labeled a price manipulator and will be refunded all anti-dumping duties paid over [...]
[The following is an op-ed, and does not necessarily express the opinions of the editors.] The controversy surrounding Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize in Literature quieted somewhat in the last couple of months as more pressing news of China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition took precedence. However, as soon as the new laureate landed in Stockholm earlier last [...]
On a day with much sad news in China and the U.S., it’s perhaps worth remembering that China’s blogosphere has been home to many touching and amazing stories in 2012. Censored and fraught thought it may be, China’s Internet is also a place populated with hundreds of millions of human beings, and thus hundreds of [...]
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